Socialism was never meant to be a system to 'help the people'. It is, from its inception, a system of mass management of populations, on behalf of a self-appointed governing class, the "intelligentsia". It's a system by which that governing class uses the powers of the state to take control over (and from then on, manage) each and every aspect of society, according to its own particular whims.

It was born out of the 19th century ideologies of "scientific/rationalist management of society", under which individual liberty could not be tolerated, and social life had to be entirely regimented, and planned, by the ruling class. That meant *everything* would ultimately be defined by the state: economics, social creeds (including religion), politics, social habits, and even population size and composition, through the practice of population control and state-run eugenics, among certain groups (abortion, sterilization, euthanasia).

The endgame of socialism is to have a system where the individual will "only be allowed to exist in order to serve the state" (as was stated by top socialists like Trotsky, GB Shaw or HG Wells). That is, under full-fledged socialism you will only be allowed to exist if you willingly serve the ruling class that sets up and manages the all-powerful state on its own behalf.

So, the big lie here is that socialism is 'meant to help the people'. No, it's not. It's a crafty way of regimenting the people to work and be slaves for a system, on behalf of a top intelligentsia.

That is why, throughout history, socialist systems only go after personal independence and the middle classes. They rarely ever hunt down the big banking and mercantile interests. In fact, they are generally set up and helped along by those -- the de facto ruling class. That is what happened in systems like the Soviet Union, which was aided and funded by top Western bankers of the day, as was brilliantly documented by Professor Antony Sutton's "Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution", among other academic works. Another good example is Communist China, a creation of the Western banking establishment, mainly through trade deals like GATT and technology/wealth transfers. The return is always economic and diplomatic rulership, and an entire population of cheap slaves.

The West is also being guided along this path by the same banking/corporate interests, who try to set up social and economic collectivism in order to better manage the system on their own behalf.

In this video, G. Edward Griffin describes two variants of the political takeover process of socialism:

- The Leninist method, based on deception and violent coup d'Etats and revolutions. To be used essentially in 'easy targets': poor, dispossessed nations with no tradition of personal independence and wealth;

- The Fabian method, to be used in affluent nations, with a tradition of personal independence and wealth. These nations would not accept Leninist revolution, so they would have to be brought down through a different method: institutional stealth and gradualism. Incremental change, on a step-by-step basis. As Fabian socialist HG Wells said, through incrementalism, you could slowly transform a free-market society into a communist one, during the span of decades, and in the end people would still call it free-market, or 'capitalist' -- even though it would be a regimented system, entirely controlled by the state corporate intelligentsia. This, of course, is the slow transformation system under which we have been living for decades now, in the Americas and Europe.

One could, and should, also include a third variant of this political/social/economic disease: *right-wing socialism*, i.e., Fascism or National Socialism (Nazism). In practice, Fascism is identical to radical left-wing socialism, with the main difference that the establishment does not pretend to work on behalf of the people. Under Fascism, you know from the beginning that you exist to work for 'your betters' in a planned society, and that they rule over you with an iron fist. It's mainly a PR difference, really.